Verily it was a great abbey in the days of King John. There, in the eighth year of that King's reign, was held that memorable council which, if it had been let alone, would doubtless have issued its protest against the intolerable aggression of the Pope and his _curia_. There, six years afterwards, another assembly was convened; the first occasion on which we find any historical proof that representatives were summoned to a national council in England. Eight times during his reign the ruffian King was himself a guest at the Abbey. Once after John's death, when Louis was desperately struggling to hold his own against young Henry's friends and supporters, he too came to St. Alban's, and threatened to give it over to fire and sword: only money saved it from a sack. There was always something to take, and yet always wonderful state kept up. The magnates in Church and State were for ever going in and out; the mere domestic expenditure was enormous. Yet, even when the country was groaning under horrible anarchy, and grinding taxation, and war and poverty, the building went on as if men lived only to glorify the great house, and to raise its church tower, or beautify the west front, or fill the windows with stained glass, or erect the splendid pulpit in the nave--a miracle of art. It would be a very great mistake to conclude that all this lavish expenditure implied the enjoyment of large rents from land. The revenue derived from the tenants of the Abbey and the profits of farming were no doubt considerable; but that revenue could never have sufficed alone to defray the cost of keeping up the establishment. In point of fact, when a monastery, great or small, depended wholly upon its landed property, it invariably got into debt; sometimes it got hopelessly into debt. It is clear that before the Dissolution a very large number of the religious houses were insolvent. The striking paucity in the number of 'religious' at the time of the suppression--for hardly one house in ten had its full complement of inmates--is by no means wholly to be attributed to the reluctance on the part of people in general to take upon themselves the monastic vows. Where a monastery was financially in a critical condition, the brotherhood resorted to the expedient which is at this moment being carried out at more than one College in Oxford and Cambridge. Now, when times are bad, we temporarily suppress a Fellowship; then, on the death of a brother of the house, they chose no monk into his place.